When everyone got into baking early covid I couldn’t understand why no one was baking anything, like, good. No pizza or pie or cake or muffins or banana bread or even a damn focaccia. The world collectively just decided the end-all be-all of baking was… sourdough.
Sourdough is fantastic, I have two loaves finishing their overnight chill in my fridge right now, will bake them after dinner.
I was baking sourdough since before the pandemic, and will continue baking in the future. It's a bit of work, but it's not too much work and the results are pretty damn fantastic.
Focaccia though, if I baked that regularly I'd have to go back on a GLP-1. Focaccia taught me to read the seals on olive oil in the supermarket and actually pick the right one for the break.
Just got a loaf out of the oven. The smell, the crust, the whole feel of something very much tangible and enjoyable . I'm very much considering opening a small bakery.
I know what you mean (I also love to bake and have had the same thought). Just remember that running a bakery is more about running a business than it is baking. If you love baking and business, great! But if you just love baking, it may kill the enjoyment.
I love sourdough, have starters in the fridge but haven't baked in a while, should do it.
Problem is, for some reason it never tastes sour enough, or like the commercial sourdough. I have done slow rise in the fridge over 24+ hours etc. Made sourdough starter from scratch several times, same result.
Bread tastes good, just not sour, or rather sour enough to tell it's sourdough.
Starters are a mix of bacteria that produce either lactic acid or acetic acid. If yours is never turning out sour enough you might be: using too much commercial yeast, not using enough starter, or having a starter culture biased towards lactic acid.
The first two are easy to fix. The third one is saying you need to keep your starter culture a little bit cooler. I keep my downstairs where the starter is between 62-67 during the winter and its plenty sour. I think dryer starters might be less sour, but I'm not sure. I run mine 100% hydration.
I'm currently baking this recipe: 300g bread flour, 300g whole wheat flour, 227g starter (100%), 541g water, 18g salt, 1/8tsp of commercial yeast. All the usual baking steps, over night retard. Two loaves
Great video that talks about selecting the olive oil for your use case and which seals aren't just self granted. I personally have been using colavita. Its fantastic.
I hate it but it's taught me that freshness actually matters. I bought some for focaccia and it was amazing. Saved it in the pantry for special occasions. Went back six months later and it had zero flavor. Just tasted like generic oil. Flat.
It ruined me.
Also if you're an engineer and like cooking, check out that guy's YouTube channel, He's very analytical in explaining cooking
Yes it's a common misconception that you can only make wide crumbed hipster crusty loaves. Those are great but if you want plain white bread, buns, croissants, etc etc it's all possible to do.
As others have said it’d wreck the flavour but you can go the other way and use spent grain from the mash in making bread which adds some pretty interesting texture and flavour.
IMO it's because it's more challenging. I've baked everything you've listed and apart from pizza (which is also bread) it's all trivial to do. You just follow a recipe.
Bread is a totally different thing. Only four ingredients: a ground up grass seed, a mineral, a single celled fungus that lives in the dough, and water. The results range from complete disaster to the best thing you've ever eaten. It all depends on your technique.
That's why it has captivated so many and in particular men, as you can get really deep and geeky. There's only so far you can go with banana bread.
> The results range from complete disaster to the best thing you've ever eaten. It all depends on your technique.
Hear hear. I'm at a local optimum where my bread tastes good, but it's a bit crumbly. When I change anything, it's nope nope backpedal. Trying to find the next step that'll improve my home baked bread
It wasn't for no reason at all though. There were concerns about availability of yeast, which isn't used in sourdough. (Valid concerns or not, I have no idea.)
I do find it kind of wild how intimidating most people I know find baking. Get a food scale and follow the directions and you're good to go and will have something respectable and delicious. As with anything, you can dive deep and go extreme with it. But baking delicious food is not rocket science.
It is fun but it's also not universal. While every house and apartment I've lived in in the USA had an oven, the default in Japan is no oven. 1 to 3 burners, and possibly a broiler is the norm.
Baking bread is not like that unless you have strict control of the environment; it is sensitive to temperature, and nature of the water and flour. It's an art; you have to read the signs. And mastering that is rewarding.
Those people are dead wrong on both counts. Cooking meals benefits more from precision than they claim (if you want reproducible results you best be measuring!), and baking does not require as much precision as they claim (I estimate ingredients all the time when baking and my bakes come out great).
There's a lot of mysticism around baking online, but in truth it's very easy. Just follow the recipe and you'll be ok. You don't need to carefully weigh ingredients and stuff like people say.
It depends, I guess. When I make pizza dough, I use around .1% yeast. Using .4g instead of .8g would make a huge difference, and getting that right without carefully weighing it is neigh impossible.
Cooking is art, baking is a very easy science (weight things and check the temperature), pastry is another thing. That requires talent, experience and a lucky star.
Because while the recipes are easy to follow, you can't fix a baked dough. If you messed up the salt, the yeast, etc. that's it. Cooking is more forgiving in that sense.
> The world collectively just decided the end-all be-all of baking was… sourdough.
I can't speak for the world, but:
1. Good bread is really hard to come by in the United States. Unless you're going to a bakery twice a week[1], or your local grocery has a contract with one [2]... Your idea of 'bread' is probably mushy garbage that I would describe as more similar to 'cake'.
2. Sourdough is relatively easy to make. Flour, salt, water, starter, time[3].
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[1] Going anywhere to buy one item that is eaten or goes bad in three days is a big ask... Which is why this isn't a great option.
[2] The overwhelming majority don't, and when they do, they want $7 a loaf.
There are, and most of them don't have good bread. (Baguettes are about the only good bread that you can reliably expect to find in them. Sometimes they have San Francisco-style sourdough, which in my experience, tastes like someone dumped a shot of lemon vinegar into it. Just because a bread uses sourdough starter doesn't mean it needs to taste sour. I feel much the same way about hops and beer.)
Regularly visiting the bakery is, for reasons I've mentioned, a lot of friction for one purchase.
My closest one carries... Weird specialty hipster breads (because it is more focused on tarts and pastries and sweets - bread is just an afterthought for it).
The one I'd go to, if my closest grocery weren't stocking them is way out of my way. I would not be making that trip twice a week.
> Regularly visiting the bakery is, for reasons I've mentioned, a lot of friction for one purchase.
That is still not "really hard to come by" as per your original claim. It's very common (not just in large cities!) to have a local bakery where you can get good bread. Whether you choose to go or not, it is available to you.
I mean, let’s at least discuss this in good faith.
“Good” bread according to the majority and bread that is specifically up to your standards are probably two very different things.
My grocery store’s bakery sells many types of fresh bread: sourdough, white, rye, croissants, ciabatta, buns, rolls, bagels, and so on. Many grocery stores in my city have a bakery section with a selection of fresh bread like this. (Even Walmart I think, but I don’t shop there).
It’s not the best bread I’ve ever eaten, but it’s fresh, good, tasty bread. It’s not “mushy garbage” and it’s not “cake” like you described in your original comment. It’s not “weird specialty hipster” bread. It’s just simple, real, fresh bread.
if it makes you feel better, we got into baking during covid and never baked sourdough once. we made pizza, cake, muffins, banana bread, regular bread, cornbread, etc. we just didn't post about it online ...
Google is doing a much better job integrating AI into existing products. Gemini CLI and such seem just like a way to keep the leading competitors humble (a la iOS vs android). They're also building AI tooling tailored to specific companies (like the Goldman thing just announced) and have the cloud infra to back it up. I really only see Anthropic and Google surviving in 10 years.
We need to tax personal vehicals by the ton. And I mean like, punitively. Pickup trucks should cost $500K if they're not registered to licensed business.
It was 2 days, and they thought it was a different ship because they thought the Yorktown was sunk in the previous battle, not because they didn't think it could be repaired that fast (although that's probably also true).
This is definitely true. I do not currently know a single woman who DOESN'T drive an SUV and the answer I've heard more than once is just that they feel safer. The problem is, they're not wrong. But it's a spiraling problem - more big cars make the roads less safe which prompts more people to buy big cars...
This is exactly the kind of list that is both not true (solving depression is not a checklist) and COMPLETELY unhelpful to anyone actually dealing with depression. It's like saying "just make more money" to someone with financial struggles.
First of all exercise should be seen as one of the first lines of defense against not only depression but chronic health problems (which also lead to depression). So you shouldn't wait until you are depressed to start exercising - ideally it is something you do all the time.
Secondly - someone who's depressed is not keen on most things - including talking to a therapist , yet we still encourage them to do it. If you have the will power to pay hundreds of dollars a session to talk to a complete stranger, in theory you may have the willpower to walk birskly for 150 minutes a week. As a society we should simply encourage everyone no matter what age or state of mind to do that.
ehhhh is it really that useful though? Sounds way more noisy than anything, and a great way to burn through tokens. It's like founding a startup to solve the problem of people squashing their commits. Also, it sounds like something Claude Code/Codex/etc could quickly add an extension for.
Of all the posts like this I’ve seen the customers are always 1) extremely scant on details about what they were using GCP for or why they were suspended, and more importantly 2) never actually paying for support.
Having worked with a fair few academics, I’m guessing they lost track of their service account keys and the account got suspended for crypto mining.
There have been plenty of posts where the reason was apparent. One i recall was caused by a guy having malware on his phone, and he happened to use a work email on his phone, so the entire GWS organization was banned, shutting down the company's operations.
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